CLARA ZETKIN'S EXCEPTIONAL ROLE IN THE LITERARY POLITICS OF GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY DURING THE EPOCH OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL (GERMAN TEXT)

Historians of socialist literature and culture from both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic agree that Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) espoused literary politics and theories, which were located outside the spectrum of those advocated by her contemporaries in German Social Democracy during the Second International. In the period between 1890 and 1914, the Party on the whole failed to encourage the growth of a nascent literary counter-culture, which had developed spontaneously in conjunction with the early Social Democratic labor movement. Clara Zetkin was one of the few leading Party members who propagated within Social Democracy the creation of a strong and autonomous literary counter-culture, which could have served to solidify the individual and social identity of members and potential followers, and could also have offered to them an attractive alternative to the aggressively anti-socialist cultural ideology predominant in Wilhelminean Germany. Both her radical and reformist comrades in the field of Party cultural politics ultimately advocated literary policies which led to the assimilation of bourgeois cultural priorities into the Party. An atomized and powerless handful of socialist writers and critics opposed this, by calling the mainstream literary tradition "irrelevant" and focusing solely on proletarian literature. Clara Zetkin steered clear of both such extremes: She advocated the critical and selective appropriation of traditional literature, and encouraged at the same time the further development of an alternative, socialist literature in the contemporary, pre-revolutionary epoch.;As editor of the Social Democratic women's newspaper Die Gleichheit, and as the main personage of the Party women's movement, Zetkin was forced to use the interests and needs of proletarian women as points of departure for their organization. Both the exigencies of the emerging socialist women's movement as a political organization, and the specific concerns of women in their double role as workers and as housewives and mothers, required that Zetkin transcend the limits of Social Democratic agitation in the solely economic and/or political realm, and give emphasis to the ideological struggle also. The needs of proletarian women led Zetkin to formulate a radical critique of, and be open to new forms in, the spheres of education, culture, entertainment and also, literature. Zetkin's literary politics and theory, her concern with cultural institutions and individual human subjectivity, were anchored in her global revolutionary aspirations. A set of fundamental political principles, which she acquired while organizing the confrontation between proletarian women and Wilhelminean society, functioned as communicating vessels between the various spheres of Zetkin's activity in the Social Democratic Party.;This historical and descriptive study examines in depth Zetkin's literary activities, their disjuncture with established Party tendencies and their integration into the entirety of her political endeavors. In delineating the interface between Zetkin's political and literary work, this study proposes an explanation for the established fact of her unique position in socialist literary theory during the Second International: It is contended that Clara Zetkin's particular, activist literary perspective arose specifically because of, and is explicable only in the light of, her major organizational activity in Social Democracy, namely recruiting proletarian women in Wilhelminean Germany for the Social Democratic Party and the project of revolutionary social change.